Turning anonymous website visitors into prospects is easier said than done. Whether Googling the nearest coffee
shop or self-diagnosing on WebMD, most web visitors are only interested in finding answers quickly, not making purchases. In fact, only 2% of your anonymous website visitors actually progress to ‘customer status.’ Which means a staggering 98% fall through the cracks.
Sadly, it takes more than a flashy website with a laundry list of company bios and products to turning anonymous website visitors into prospects. Truth is, they’re information seekers, thirsty for answers and couldn’t care less about your company or what you have to sell them. It takes a different type of marketing approach to convince random web visitors to do business with companies over the Internet.
In this blog, we will identify three strategies that turn anonymous website visitors into prospects by gently guiding them through your sales process.
Satisfy Research Questions with Top of the Funnel Content
Prospects don’t just wake up and buy products or services from the first business they come across. First, triggers (or problems) motivate them to log onto a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo to look for answers. This search is the perfect opportunity to get noticed by people who have never even heard of your company.
The best way to get noticed is to satisfy their need for valuable information with a blog post that provides a solution to their immediate dilemma.
At the bottom of that blog, use an eye-catching Call-To-Action button leading to a landing page in order to leave a trail to an even more helpful piece of content called the Top of The Funnel (TOFU) offer. TOFU can come in many forms – an eBook, whitepaper, webinar, etc. The only way to retrieve it is by filling out the form on the landing page. The key to successful TOFU is staying focused on satisfying research questions and NOT being salesy. If you succeed in answering their questions, readers will be appreciative and more likely to be receptive to marketing efforts.
Create Optimized Call to Actions
The link to the landing page of the TOFU offer mentioned above has a special name, a Call to Action (CTA) button. You’ve seen a CTA before; you probably just didn’t realize it had an actual name. CTA Buttons are used to draw attention and funnel site visitors to the premium offers.
CTA buttons should feature well-written text that speaks to the bigger issue plaguing the reader. Here’s the catch, the content being promoted is gated behind a form on the landing page and visitors must provide their contact information in order to retrieve it. Nothing too personal like social security numbers; a name and email address is more than enough to get started. Once this content is retrieved and visitors have identified themselves, those anonymous people become Information Qualified Leads, which means they are officially interested in your content. Suddenly, those anonymous website visitors aren’t so anonymous anymore. With this information, you can officially introduce them to your sales funnel and all its glory.
Prepare A Smooth Landing
The next essential element in this strategy is a landing page. The process of converting anonymous website
visitors would not be complete or truly strategic without a focused landing page. These pages are very different from the standard web pages found on most websites. Good landing pages focus on one offer and include a mechanism to capture contact information using form fields. They are void of any distractions, such as social media buttons, menus, or any thing else that could lead anonymous web visitors away from the offer at hand.
After clicking on the CTA, you must lead visitors to a landing page to close the deal. Poorly designed landing pages can completely undo every bit of work and effort invested thus far.